As most service providers of today are experiencing the markets ever-growing demand for better service, speed and flexibility, it is important also for printing service providers to be able to mix ever-faster services with total/optimal flexibility, to a customer wanting customised printed products at low costs and on short notice, for the printing service providers to be competitive now and in the future.
Many different kinds of businesses and organisations are dependent on a continuous updating/customising of their printed material including: national and regional retail chains wanting to update their point of sale displays, event planners and promoters needing material for promoting different events, as well as every small to major business requiring company designed stationary, business cards, envelopes, letterheads and/or business forms, regulated by the company's graphic profile.
Formerly printing orders were manually sent to commercial printing services, like print shops, having its product going through the stages of: typesetting and proofing, changes to proof, corrections and proofing, customer approval and print production before final delivery and payment. The product was then sent back and forth a couple of times between customer and print shop, which is both time consuming, inflexible and demanded quite a lot of administrative work.
The graphic arts industry is however gradually shifting from analogue to digital techniques, ever so slowly due to the fragmentation of the printing industry. Processes are being simplified through the use of computers, graphic arts equipment and the Internet, which brings about that information flows between customer and print shop can be rationalised and costs reduced.
Some modern printing systems already allows a user to customise printed material on the Internet using template formats, stored reference information and user input data.
The document WO 98/08176 for example shows a system for creating and proofing customised printed material utilising dynamic Portable Document Format (PDF) technology before printing on a production printing system. A user connects to an Internet web site provided by a commercial printing service where he/she then selects from a plurality of available templates for the printed material. Additional pre-stored information to be included can also be selected or the user can input variable information through a keyboard or the like.
The system according to the WO document has some drawbacks in that it does not use PDF through all points of the workflow, which means that the service provider always must have access to a database containing high-resolution images and fonts. Their solution is therefore not stand-alone. They are also further limited, to sending print orders only to service providers connected to their system.
Yet another disadvantage is the fact that the printable matter created with this system is totally template based. The templates are created with a desktop publishing program, most likely “off-line” outside of the actual system presented, a fact which adds on to the inflexibility of this system.